The labor-intensive tasks required to maintain all aspects of an operating system (such as the Solaris Operating System) networked devices presents inherit risks to system availability. Each phase of the installation/build and maintenance processes require manual activities that are prone to process errors and operator imprecision. In certain environments, it is also important that each server running the operating system is built with an identical file structure, to ensure compatibility and to comply with, for example, a corporation's infrastructure standards. Also, encompassed within the need to improve these installation/build and maintenance processes are goals to increase speed-of-delivery and reduce mean-time-to-repair.